For Protozone16: Hallucinogenesis (13.09.-03.11.2024), Nikhil Vettukattil presents two interconnected video works, Amnesia (2022) and Alienation (2021), together for the first time. A workshop by the Institute for Scene Experiments will also take place in October to activate the space.

Amnesia (2022)

“The piece started with thinking about my own memories of living in a small village in Kerala, my family has almost no photographs or videos from that time, or what they did was lost or destroyed by the climate. For a few years I’ve been researching Malayalam films from the region that don’t fit the Bollywood mould, what was called Parallel Cinema.

Most of the images don’t play a major role in the films, but they have ambivalent symbolism. Most of the images are selected because they resonate with something I can remember, or at least think I can, or something someone told me, some of the objects and images of life, eg. talcum powder, oil lamps, coconut tree leaves falling, stuff like this. The work is intuitive but borrows from method developed in previous works and is conceived as a counterpart to Alienation (2021).

The sound is a recording of a Raga Malkauns by Pandit Prahn Nath, which I re-edited so it is stretched and manipulated into an 8 hour file that I then edited down. It’s one of the oldest ragas and is meant to be played after midnight until the early hours of the morning, it has a kind of melancholy tone and has a complex narrative around destruction, grief and later calm contemplation. It’s also connected with the supernatural and summoning spirits in some traditions.”

Alienation (2021)

Alienation consists of 560 photographs that have been scanned and cropped manually, and one video of stock footage from a smartphone production line in Bangladesh.

The photographs are excerpted from three canonical photo exhibitions of the 90s: Michael Schmidt’s EIN-HEIT (1996), Michael Kenna The Rouge (1995) and Santiago Sierra Workers. An Archaeology of the Industrial Age (1993). Each photograph is shown for one 60th of a second as a flash of inverted after-image.

Combined with a pulsing techno soundtrack of Federico Franchi’s Black Alienation (1996) the work is a reflection on work and free time, raves, industrial culture and alienated labour. The video repeats twice in a 12 minute loop, where the images are shown in two different orders, to play on the viewers experience and memory.

Institute for Scene Experiments

The Institute for Scene Experiments is an semi-fictional institution devoted to the investigation, production and dissemination of scenes. It is a situation for exchanging knowledge around different technical aspects of filmmaking and performance.

We will analyse, deconstruct and reconstitute elements of scenes for camera, exploring alternative ways of staging narrative, framing, sound, etc. ISE aims to reflect on the film crew as a social form, engaging in the generativity and potentialities of scenes independent of plot, development and conclusivity, through methods of commissioned text as well as collective authorship, ‘open rehearsals’ and collective editing.

The workshops will shift emphasis from the complete work of art to the structures and infrastructures that mediate the process towards a final work; the scene, the sequence, the script, the edit, amongst others.

Nikhil Vettukattil is an artist living and working in Oslo. Using a range of media such as sound, installation, performance, text, sculpture, and video, their practice questions modes of representation and image-making processes in their relation to lived experiences.

They studied at Central St. Martins in London and the Center for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP). Recent exhibitions include Hothouse Flowers, Podium, Oslo (2024), Postproduction, Studiengalerie 1.357 Goethe University, Frankfurt (2023), Contaminators, FELIX GAUDLITZ, Vienna (2023) and Claustrophobia Alpina III, Ford, Geneva (2023).

They are a founding member of the Institute for Scene Experiments. Forthcoming solo presentations include Oslo Kunstforening, AGIT, Berlin and Arcadia Missa, London.